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December 10, 2011, 5:58 am UTC

The reason why online marketing has not delivered for many businesses despite being the best thing that could happen to marketing in many years is the way lazy marketers treat this medium. For marketers adapt to atomic world, digital is nothing just 0s (zeros) and 1s (ones) which can be understood by extrapolating their existing knowledge of marketing in the atomic world. And this is where they err and commit the following mistakes, which dilute their activity and suck money out of their marketing budget.

Treat it like a broadcast medium

This mistake is expected of all, and in fact it is but natural for a human to do so, particularly if the human is lazy.

When a marketer encounters a new phenomenon, he or she tries to make sense of it, and most often without devoting enough time to understand the new phenomenon. Consequently, he end-up using his existing knowledge, which is insufficient, to understand the new phenomenon. His attempt to make sense of new phenomenon using the old model pushes him to the dark corner where only mistakes can happen. This has happened to marketers who see the online world as a mere extension of the broadcast media he has seen all his life.

Sharing is waste of resources for you

In the world of scarcity giving away anything means losing the possession of that stuff. This is so true for the world in which we live, but things are different on the Internet. Sharing does not mean losing possession. Sharing here means sharing stuff with likeminded people and builds your brand in the process.

If you are an old-school marketer, sharing is the waste of time, money, and energy, and this is where you err.

Shouting it out can make most people hear about you

Online media is mostly free, or it cost a way less than what it costs to buy spot in a film or a cricket match, so a marketing manager of a big company tend to blast out the campaign on the Internet with a hope that shouting it loud will make everyone listen to the message. But instead people ignore.

Read the above listed mistakes carefully, and reread it until you get the conviction that you are not going to repeat it because that is the only way to succeed on the Internet.